“with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made.”
The spirit of Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for the moment’s sake. He enjoys it for the woman’s sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last for a week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary…. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“reversing, surely, the order of nature by treating their bodies as means of gratification and their souls as mere encumbrances. It makes no odds, to my mind, whether such men live or die; alive or dead, no one hears of them. The truth is that no man really lives or gets any satisfaction out of life, unless he devotes all his energies to some task and seeks fame by some notable achievement or by the cultivation of some admirable gift.”
Sallust The Conspiracy of Catiline
“Is the normal human need, the normal human condition, higher or lower than those special states of the soul which call out a doubtful and dangerous glory? Those special powers of knowledge or sacrifice which are made possible only by the existence of evil? Which should come first to our affections, the enduring sanities of peace or the half-maniacal virtues of battle? Which should come first, the man great in the daily round or the man great in emergency? Which should come first, to return to the enigma before me, the grocer or the chemist”
Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“It is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by David W. Fagerberg in First Things March 2000
“it is the nature of man not to have a nature.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Mortimer Adler Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought (Adler does not agree with Merleau-Ponty, but thinks the idea well worth pondering)
“Whosoever is out of patience is out of possession of his mind, body and soul.”
Sir Francis Bacon, quoted in the “Federalist Patriot” No. 04-34 25 August 2004 from federalist.com
“Every activity has its own specific goal. Pleasure very probably ensues in most cases when this goal is reached, but that is a different matter.”
I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism